Virtual Hosting and Tomcat

Table of Contents

Assumptions

For the sake of this how-to, assume you have a development host with two
host names, ren and stimpy. Let's also assume
one instance of Tomcat running, so $CATALINA_HOME refers to
wherever it's installed, perhaps /usr/local/tomcat.

Note that the directory structures under the appBase for each host should
not overlap each other.

Consult the configuration documentation for other attributes of the
Engine and
Host elements.

Webapps Directory

Create directories for each of the virtual hosts:

mkdir $CATALINA_HOME/renapps
mkdir $CATALINA_HOME/stimpyapps

Configuring Your Contexts

General

Contexts are normally located underneath the appBase directory. For
example, to deploy the foobar context as a war file in
the ren host, use
$CATALINA_HOME/renapps/foobar.war. Note that the
default or ROOT context for ren would be deployed as
$CATALINA_HOME/renapps/ROOT.war (WAR) or
$CATALINA_HOME/renapps/ROOT (directory).

NOTE: The docBase for a context should never be
the same as the appBase for a host.

context.xml - approach #1

Within your Context, create a META-INF directory and then
place your Context definition in it in a file named
context.xml. i.e.
$CATALINA_HOME/renapps/ROOT/META-INF/context.xml
This makes deployment easier, particularly if you're distributing a WAR
file.